Reading the source code is a pathway to many abilities that some consider… unnatural.

Luke’s original strategy was to attack the death star via SQL injection, but in the end he went for an X-Wing based buffer overflow.

I want to encourage you to actually read through the open source code for the software that you’re using. Doing so has many potential benefits, and skills like this can give you a real edge and advantage in your team. In the article I’m going to outline my top three benefits for doing so.

There are a lot of cool Linux commands and tools you COULD learn, but what’s the point in investing a bunch of time if you just use them once a week, or once a month? A good example I like to give is Vim — it takes a long time to learn and master, but I use it over 10 times a day so it’s worth it.

vim — the universal text editor

I remember thinking vim was stupid — so many keypresses and shortcuts to remember. Before that I was a nano user. What got me to switch? I started getting really annoyed that all the servers I was logging into didn’t have nano installed, didn’t have syntax highlighting, and similar. I consciously stuck with it and now I have a text editor that I love on every server.

Taken in approx Mar 2021

I want to explain how I use this setup, and how I got here. Perhaps I will encourage you, to experiment with your desk and workflow.

Pictured above, is my desk. It does indeed have 6 monitors. It also has 4 computers with 3 operating systems (2x Linux, 1x Windows — for gaming, 1x Mac — for iOS development).

I don’t intend to brag, or show off, or try and say that this set-up is absolutely essential for me and that nothing else would work. However, it certainly works for me. This is what I naturally got to after lots of experimenting over the years. I certainly don’t think having lots of monitors is right for many people — certainly 1 large 4k ultra wide monitor is a very popular option for many people now-a-days.

My desktop after the story; i3, st, and some other stuff.

It was worth it, but I need to explain how I got here.

It’s about 2pm on a Friday afternoon, my week of meetings is finally drying up. I have a few hours in my calendar the rest of the day — and I’m not going to spend it catching up on more emails. I want to fill these last couple of hours with something a bit more fun, so I pick up the Ansible collection I was hacking code on and get to work.

This post is about how, and why, I use Git Annex to implement my 3-2-1 backup strategy backup strategy. In summary, that is;

• At least 3 copies of the data
• In at least 2 different storage mediums
• With at least 1 copy offsite

In practicality, I’ve used Git Annex to implement more like a 9-5-3 backup strategy and track everything nicely. This strategy should mean that I should not ever lose files that I care about ever again.

This article is about how I often invest time in ambitious projects just for the joy of working on the project, often without the intention of finishing or publishing the project. By the end of this article I hope you can see why investing your time in such projects is interesting and useful, so you can understand why I spend so much time on this, and why you might consider doing the same too.

This article explains how I solved a couple of challenges of getting my initial environment and configs into Git — the first steps to GitOps.

I’ve been wanting to embrace GitOps for quite some time, but it’s always tricky to know where to start. Do I use Jenkins Jobs — I know Jenkins well? It’s a bit old school though, maybe I should be using Ansible Tower. I’ve heard things about ArgoCD, and lots of others. The truth is, I can’t do anything until I actually have my environment and configuration stored in Git.

Speed up your command line navigation

Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels

Knowing a few key shortcuts can have a surprising impact. As someone who sits frequently with others over a command line to help debug code and navigate servers, it’s easy to become frustrated on their behalf at how cumbersome things can be when you may not know time-saving shortcuts.

Here are some essential shortcuts and key tips to help you speed up your command line usage.

This article was written after 24 hours with a Mac Mini, i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD. Mac OS Catalina. My own Monitor, Mouse, Keyboard.

What am I used to?

Been using Linux (Fedora, KDE) as my “daily desktop” for a longgg time now and 200% happy with it. It’s just perfect for me.

Windows. Have used everything Windows 95 up until Windows Vista as a “daily desktop”, then I switched to Linux. I’ve still used everything up to Windows 10, and I do have a Windows 10 laptop, but I only use as a games console.

We’ve all been there, you just want to hack up a quick Ansible playbook to do a quick task, and then you find yourself fighting with syntax, chopping and changing things around, wondering why this simple Ansible playbook isn’t working. Let me give you a few hints to make your life easier.

This is especially useful if you’re on a new machine that doesn’t come with all your personal configuration, dotfiles and preferred editors! This happens to me quite a lot when setting up new environments.